The use of mobile communication terminals is rapidly increasing due to their handy portability. To draw more users, service providers (terminal manufacturers) competitively develop terminals with far more convenient functions. For example, as crimes, such as kidnapping and abduction, are frequent these days, the mobile communication terminal provides an emergency paging service or a positioning service to the user against emergencies.
In regards to the positioning service, a mobile communication provider network receives a positioning request from a user terminal, tracks the position of the other user terminal, and informs the user of the obtained location. That is, when the user wants to know the location of another user, the user accesses the mobile communication provider network which provides the positioning service, inputs information of the terminal of the other user, is authenticated to track the position of the other user, and thus receives the current position of the other user from the mobile communication provider network. Representative examples of the positioning service include a friend searching service or a missing child searching service.
As discussed above, the conventional positioning service detects the location of the target terminal over the mobile communication network and informs the terminal requesting the positioning of the detected location. In other words, the conventional positioning service incurs the additional cost for the mobile communication network access, and the user needs to continuously access the positioning service in some cases to detect the location of the target terminal. For example, to know the location of the child when the child goes to school or comes back from school, the parent has to access the corresponding service constantly, in real time, and receive the position information of his/her child.
In addition, because the positioning service provides only the information within a certain radius of a particular location, a region unwanted by the user can be set as a search area.